Climategate is Still the Issue

TRANSCRIPT: This week marks the one year anniversary of the release of emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that we now know as Climategate.

Sitting here now, one year later, it’s becoming difficult to remember the importance of that release of information, or even what information was actually released. Many were only introduced to the scandal through commentary in the blogosphere and many more came to know about it only weeks later, after the establishment media had a chance to assess the damage and fine tune the spin that would help allay their audience’s concern that something important had just happened. Very few have actually bothered to read the emails and documents for themselves.

Few have browsed the “Harry Read Me” file, the electronic notes of a harried programmer trying to make sense of the CRU’s databases. They have never read for themselves how temperatures in the database were “artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures” or the “hundreds if not thousands of dummy stations” which somehow ended up in the database, or how the exasperated programmer resorts to expletives before admitting he made up key data on weather stations because it was impossible to tell what data was coming from what sources.

Few have read the 2005 email from Climategate ringleader and CRU head Phil Jones to John Christy where he states “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.” Or where he concludes: “As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”

Or the email where he broke the law by asking Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to delete a series of emails related to a Freedom of Information request he had just received.

Or the email where he wrote: “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”

Or the other emails where these men of science say they will re-define the peer review process itself in order to keep differing view points out of the scientific literature, or where they discuss ousting a suspected skeptic out of his editorial position in a key scientific journal, or where they fret about how to hide the divergence in temperature proxy records from observed temperatures, or where they openly discuss the complete lack of warming over the last decade or any of the thousands of other emails and documents exposing a laundry list of gross scientific and academic abuses.

Of course, the alarmists continue to argue–as they have ever since they first began to acknowledge the scandalÑthat climategate is insignificant. Without addressing any of the issues or specific emails, they simply point to the “independent investigations” that they say have vindicated the climategate scientists.

Like the UK parliamentary committee, which issued a report claiming that Phil Jones and the CRU’s scientific credibility remained intact after a rigorous one day hearing which featured no testimony from any skeptic or dissenting voice. After the release of the report, the committee stressed that the report did not address all of the issues raised by climategate and Phil Willis, the committee chairman admitted that the committee had rushed to put out a report before the British election.

Or the Oxburgh inquiry, chaired by Lord Ron Oxburgh, the UK Vice Chair of Globe International, an NGO-funded climate change legislation lobby group. The Oxburgh inquiry released a five page report after having reviewed 11 scientific papers unrelated to the climategate scandal that had been hand-picked by Phil Jones himself. It heard no testimony or evidence from anyone critical of the CRU. Unsurprisingly, it found the climategaters not guilty of academic misconduct.

Regardless of what one thinks of the veracity or independence of these so-called investigations into the climategate scandal itself, what has followed has been a catastrophic meltdown of the supposedly united front of scientific opinion that manmade CO2 is causing catastrophic global warming.

In late November of 2009, just days after the initial release of the climategate emails, the University of East Anglia was in the hotseat again. The CRU was forced to admit they had thrown away most of the raw data that their global temperature calculations were based upon, meaning their work was not reproducible by any outside scientists.

In December of that year, the UN’s Copenhagen climate talks broke down when a negotiating document was leaked showing that–contrary to all prÑit would be the third world nations bearing the brunt of a new international climate treaty, with punishing restrictions on carbon emissions that would prevent them from ever industrializing. The document, written by industrialized nations, allowed the first world to emit twice as much carbon per person as the third world, and was widely seen as an implementation of a eugenical austerity program under a “green” cover. This agenda was further exposed by the influential Optimum Population Trust in the UK, which began arguing that same month that rich westerners offset their carbon footprints by funding programs to stop black people from breeding.

In January 2010, the United Nations’ much-lauded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change began to fall apart as error after error began to emerge in this supposedly unassailable peer-reviewed, scientific document asserting human causation of catastrophic climate change. That month it was revealed that a passing comment to a journalist from an Indian climatologist that the Himalayan glaciers could melt within 40 years found its way into the much-touted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth report on climate change via a World Wildlife Fund fundraising pamphlet. When IPCC defenders tried to pass the universally derided prediction off as a legitimate mistake, the coordinating lead author of that section of the report admitted that the IPCC knew that the report was based on baseless speculation in a non-peer reviewed work, but included it because “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

Later that month, doubt was cast on another claim in the IPCC report, this one that 40% of the Amazon rainforest was in danger of disappearing due to manmade global warming. These doubts were confirmed in July when the claim was sourced back to pure, unverified speculation on the now-defunct website of a Brazilian environmental advocacy group. Just this month, the exact opposite of the original claim was shown to be the case when a new study appeared in Science demonstrating that forests in past warming periods were not decimated but in fact blooming with life, experiencing a “rapid and distinct increase in plant diversity and origination rates.”

Also in January, the UK Information Commissioner ruled that researchers at the CRU had broken the law by refusing to comply with Freedom of Information requests, but that no criminal prosecution would follow because of a statute of limitations on prosecuting the illegal activity.

In February, the UK Guardian revealed that a key study co-authored by Phil Jones that purported to show there was no such thing as the well-researched Urban Heat Island effect was found to have relied on seriously flawed data. This, according to the Guardian, led to “apparent attempts to cover up problems with [the] temperature data.”

In September, John Holdren, the man who had previously advocated adding sterilizing agents to the water supply to combat the overpopulation problem which he thought would ravage the Earth by the year 2000, and who currently is the Science czar in the Obama White House, advocated a name change for global warming to “climate disruption,” further affirming the theory’s non-scientific status as an unfalsifiable prediction that anything that ever is due to manmade carbon dioxide.

Later that month, Britain’s prestigious Royal Society rewrote its climate change summary to admit that the science was infused with uncertainties and that “It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future…”

In October, a carbon reduction advocacy group called 10:10 released a video to promote its campaign in which those skeptical about participating in the program are
.

And just this month, Scientific American, a publication that has been noted for publishing increasingly alarmist reports about the reality and the dangers of manmade-2 induced global warming, a poll of its own readers that found over 77 believe natural processes to be the cause of climate change and almost 80 responded that they would not be willing to pay a single penny on schemes to “forestall” the supposed effects of supposedly-manmade global warming (warming that even climategate scientist Phil Jones now admits is no longer taking place).

And this is only the briefest of overviews of the range of information that Climategate.tv has been tracking over the past year. The reports undermine the data, its sources, the scientific processes used, the scientists themselves, and their conclusions. It shows that the main temperature records that are used to determine the highly-problematic concept of the global mean temperature are in fact in the hands of scientists like Phil Jones and James Hansen with a direct stake in the continuation of the alarmist scare. When these scientists are questioned on the sources of their data they advocate deleting emails and even deleting data itself. They admit that key data underlying their calculations has already been deleted.

And yet, with all of this, they have the audacity to continue to suggest that there is overwhelming concensus on the “science” of global warming. They call for public debates with skeptics who they invariably accuse of being funded by Big Oil, and then, when those debates are actually organized, they then back out of those debates. They then continue to call for the imprisonment of anyone who dares to question this supposed iron-clad .

And now, they are preparing to meet once again.

Next month, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will descend on Cancun, Mexico, to once again try to hammer out a globally-binding agreement on the restriction of carbon emissions. They will once again act as if carbon dioxide is a vile poison and not one of the essential ingredients of life on this planet. They will once again pretend that a causal link between carbon dioxide and catastrophic or unprecedented warming has been established. They will once again pretend that inflicting severe austerity on the third world in the name of greening the earth is anything other than
.

This year, though, there will be a difference. The public at large is another year older, another year wiser, and less prepared than ever to accept unquestioned the dire assertions of grandstanding politicians and the scientists they fund that the world is on the brink of imminent destruction. When they say the science is certain and settled, we will know better. When they say that this is humanity’s last chance, we will see them for the Chicken Little’s they have always been.

This is not a call for complacency. In fact, now that the public is more skeptical than ever about the climategaters and others of their ilk, the danger of binding international agreements enacted by unelected institutions and empowering global taxation is at an all-time high. They are hoping to ram through an agreement that will put the final nail in the coffin of climate realism before the corpse of the global warming hoax even has the chance to rot.

We have to speak out against this fraud now, and more loudly than ever. We must make our voices heard when we assert that science is about honesty, about openness, about the search for the truth, and that those who reject those principles will no longer be heeded by a public that has been stretched long past the point of credulity.

Once again the UN-funded scientists and politicians are telling us that the hour is nigh, and perhaps, for once, they are right. The end is almost here for those who are trying to establish their global governance in the name of a scientific fraud. If we continue to speak out on this issue, perhaps there will be no UNFCCC conference next year after all.

For if climategate has taught us anything, it is that just one year can make all the difference.